James Carroll is a former Catholic priest, a novelist and the author
of a prize winning, but quite awful, memoir An
American Requiem, which told the story of the differences
between him and his Father, a chief of Military Intelligence, during
the Vietnam War. Here he's after even bigger game than his Dad and
the military-industrial establishment, as he takes on the Catholic Church
and Christianity itself. His essential argument is that Christianity
has been defined throughout its history by its anti-Judaism, that the resulting
anti-Semitism led directly to the Holocaust, and that the failure to recognize
and come to terms with these facts results in a continued, though perhaps
unintentional, anti-Semitic aspect of modern Christianity.

Auschwitz is the climax of the story that begins
at Golgotha. Just as the climax of Oedipus
Rex--the king sees that he is the killer--reveals
that the hubris that drove the play's action was itself
the flaw that shaped the king's character, so we
can already say that Auschwitz, when seen in the
links of causality, reveals that the hatred of Jews
has been no incidental anomaly but a central action
of Christian character. Jew hatred's perversion
of the Gospel message launched a history, in other
words, that achieved its climax in the Holocaust,
an epiphany presented so starkly it can no longer
be denied. We shall see how defenders of the
Church take pains to distinguish between
"anti-Judaism" and "antisemitism"; between Christian
Jew-hatred as a "necessary but sufficient"
cause of the Holocaust; between the "sins of the
children" and the sinlessness of the Church as such.
These distinctions become meaningless before the
core truth of this history : Because the hatred of
Jews had been made holy, it became lethal.
The most sacred "thinking and acting" of the Church as
such must at last be called into question.

The book opens with a consideration of the controversy that arose when
a group of Carmelite nuns sought to erect a cross at Auschwitz, to commemorate
Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, and the Franciscan priest
Maximilian Kolbe who were martyred there. Stein, whose Carmelite
name was Sister Teresa Benedicta, was made a saint in 1998. In 1979,
Pope John Paul II visited the site and prayed for her and for Kolbe, and
in his sermon referred to Auschwitz as "the Golgotha of the modern world."
Jewish organizations took exception to Christian prayers and symbolism
at Auschwitz, with one group pleading : "Stop praying for the Jews who
were killed in the Shoah. Let them rest in peace as Jews."
Numerous subsequent controversies arose, but a large wooden cross remains
in a field outside the walls of the camp. This incident leads Carroll
to the following :

Here is the question a Christian must ask : Does
our assumption about the redemptive meaning of
suffering, tied to the triumph of Jesus Christ and
applied to the Shoah, inevitably turn every effort
to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust into a
claim to be the masters of Jews in the other world ?

The book then is his intensely personal, and often incoherent, attempt
to rid himself of every element of Christian belief that he thinks might
somehow be interpreted as offensive to Jews, and to thereby atone for the
Holocaust, which one feels compelled to observe was over by the time he
was two.

As a threshold matter, this kind of quintessentially modern longing
to atone for sins that we did not ourselves commit, really serves to destroy
the concept of moral responsibility. Carroll resembles Bill Clinton
traveling through Africa apologizing for slavery. Clinton, despite
his many sins, is obviously not responsible for slavery, and his mea culpas
are therefore both meaningless and self-serving. Similarly, if Carroll
really feels the need to apologize to someone, let him apologize for those
things for which he actually merits some blame. He could apologize
to the Vietnamese boat people for his short sighted opposition to the Vietnam
War or he could apologize to the millions of unborn children whose abortion
he supported. These are things for which he actually bears some moral
responsibility and it might be a good idea for him to face the consequences
of his oft-stated views on these topics in the same way he demands that
Catholicism face up to the consequences of its views. Instead he
engages in the intellectually dishonest exercise of ostentatiously beating
his breast over the Holocaust in such a holier-than-thou manner that the
reader, this one at least, is unwilling to forgive the many occasions on
which his faux guilt obstructs his capacity to reason.

It's a long book, so we can't tackle all of the dubious points he makes
here, but let's look at a few :

In the first instance, Carroll is so anxious to blame Christians for
the tension between Christians and Jews that he gives Jewish beliefs and
history short shrift. The most bizarre aspect of the book is that
he treats Jewish history as if it had ended with the Holocaust. It's
not possible, nor proper, to diminish the horror of the murder of six million
Jews, but if you examine Jewish history with any sense of perspective you
would have to grant that the modern reestablishment of the state of Israel
is at least as significant an event as the Holocaust.

But it's not just history that he glosses over, it's Judaism itself.
If you are going to take Judaism seriously you have to acknowledge that
the belief in the ancient Israelites as God's Chosen people lies at the
very core of Jewish belief. And it is necessary to acknowledge that
this belief, by its very nature, is exclusive and discriminatory.
To this day, Israel's religious laws only grant "right of return" to the
children of Jewish mothers. If not racist, this is at least racialist.
Carrying Jewish law to its ultimate conclusion would make the Jewish people
a completely exclusive group. While this can in no way justify any
anti-Semitic behavior, it obviously has to have contributed to tensions
between Jews and non-Jews.

Additionally, it is hard to believe that two religions which differ
over the identity of the Messiah, who after all is the central figure in
mankind's redemption, could possibly exist cheek by jowl without some level
of tension between them. We need not, and can not, determine which
side is right in this dispute, but there is certainly no reason to believe
Christians are more at fault for believing that Christ was the Messiah
than Jews are for not believing. But Carroll has predetermined that
Judaism is blameless and Christianity is guilty, so he does not bother
to consider actual Jewish beliefs.

Second, he treats anti-Semitism as some kind of isolated aberration
in human history, as if it, and the Holocaust in particular, bear no relation
to any other forms of prejudice, bigotry and genocide. This requires
him to ignore or dismiss the fact that the Holocaust, no matter how horrific,
is just one in a series of mind-boggling mass murders perpetrated by various
states over the course of the century. Forget Stalin and his 10 million
victims, Mao and his 20 million, forget Pol Pot wiping out half of the
population of Cambodia, forget the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians,
forget the Tutsi and the Hutus, forget the Serbs and the Croats and the
Bosnians, forget the fact that Hitler was also busy murdering Gypsies and
Slavs, forget them all--Carroll's guilt ridden mind only has room for the
Holocaust. And why ? Because it's the one instance where he
can blame the Church.

It's an uncomfortable-making topic, but one has to ask whether the Judaism
of the Jews even mattered much to the Nazis. As the series of slaughters
above indicates, totalitarian states have frequently found it convenient
to scapegoat a minority group and turn loose the frustrated fury of the
downtrodden citizenry upon them. Carroll himself seems to realize
this when he dismisses ancient Roman persecution of the early Christians
:

The Christian Jews were punished not for what they
believed or refused to believe, or for any
political threat they posed, but because, as a readily
identifiable and vulnerable group, consisting in
all likelihood mainly of slaves and lower-class
workers with whom other Jews seemed no to
identify, they were useful to Nero in providing
the angry citizens of Rome with another target for
their hatred besides him.

Would that Carroll understood just this one sentence he has written.
Drop the word "Christian;" replace the later use of "Jews" with the word
"Germans;" and replace "Nero" with "Hitler;" and he could have saved himself
hundreds of pages of Church bashing. What's most remarkable about
all of the genocides of human history is how easily you can fit them into
this sentence by just adjusting a few words. As chilling as it may
appear, the beliefs of the murderers and the victims don't really matter
much, what matters is the nature of the states which commit these crimes.

In his invaluable book The
True Believer, Eric Hoffer made it clear that all fanatical mass movements
share certain characteristics; among these are the need to claim that the
group to which they belong is uniquely excellent, that they make absolutist
claims for their own beliefs, that they are driven to attack non-members
of their group, and that they tend to run out of steam after an initial
period of activism. Taking all of these characteristics into account,
it seems obvious that the Holocaust was a function, not of Christianity,
but of Nazism. It may well be true, as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen argued
in Hitler's Willing Executioners,
that German culture, thanks in large part to unfortunate warping of Christian
teachings and traditions, was predisposed to a particularly virulent form
of Jew hatred, but the fact remains that it was only the rise of the Nazis
which unleashed the Holocaust. Germans had hated Jews for hundreds
of years without trying to exterminate them and by the early part of the
20th Century, Jews had been pretty well integrated into German society,
despite lingering bigotry and tension. The Holocaust does not represent
one point on a Christian continuum; it is a necessary outcome of Nazism,
rather than Christianity.

This is a third big problem with the book. His obsessive focus
on the Church blinds him to the true nature of Nazi Germany. In his
excellent new book, The Third Reich
: A New History, Michael Burleigh makes it clear that the intent of
the Nazis was to replace all of society's institutions with Nazism.
They did not view the Catholic Church as a collaborator in their exterminationist
mission; they viewed the Church as a rival to the new state religion of
Nazism. Even the Church's most vigorous critics, of which Carroll
is obviously one, would have to admit that mass murder runs counter to
the fundamental teachings of Christianity. Even if we concede that
there is a significant strain of anti-Semitism within Christianity, it
certainly does not take priority of place over the Ten Commandments, the
Golden Rule, or the Sermon on the Mount. A regime, like Hitler's,
which hoped to perpetrate genocide on a massive scale, well understood
that traditional religious and moral beliefs had to first be replaced by
a new set of Nazi teachings. The Holocaust was made possible by the
demise of Christian morality and its replacement by Nazi imperatives.

As a general matter, the biggest problem with the book is that Carroll
really just wants to use the Holocaust as a club with which to beat the
Church. His problem is not truly with the Church's anti-Semitism,
it is with the Church itself. The title of the book refers to Constantine's
famous conversion to Christianity when he had a vision of a cross in
the sky just before the battle at Milvian Bridge. As Carroll sees
it, this moment converted the cross from a benign symbol of quiescent Christian
suffering into a belligerent symbol of Christianity rampant and triumphant
: the cross became a sword. From that moment forth, Christianity
sought to impose its vision upon other peoples. This is deeply troubling
to Carroll because he apparently prefers the Jewish model, of a religion
that is not evangelical but is instead completely restricted to an insular
ethnic group.

In the final section of the book he calls for a Vatican III, to examine
ways to reform the Church. Among his proposals :

-Include Protestants, Jews and members of other religions
in the deliberations.

-Do away with the doctrine of Papal infallibility

-Replace the belief in salvation through Christ,
with an image of Christ as merely representing a
manifestation of God's love.

-Acknowledge the holiness of democracy and reexamine
the Church's historic relationship with
non-democratic governments.

-Repent for the Church's historic anti-Semitism.

Now some of this is fairly unobjectionable : as a Protestant, I find
papal infallibility fairly dubious and it's fine by me if the Church wants
to apologize for anti-Semitism. The other elements though are simply
ridiculous. Why should non-Catholics have any say in these matters
? Should Judaism convene a meeting and allow Christians to weigh
in on Jewish beliefs ? Guess what ? Our first suggestion would
be that they recognize that Christ was the Messiah. Does anyone see
how this would be at all helpful to Judaism ?

More foolish is Carroll's fetishization of democracy. This is
one point where his abysmal lack of historical understanding is graphically
displayed. He seems not to understand that the Holocaust was a democratic
act and that anti-Semitism is a democratic prejudice. As Goldhagen
makes clear in Hitler's Willing Executioners, the Holocaust was not perpetrated
by some aberrant little clique, it was perpetrated by the German people
as a whole. The murder of Jews expressed the will of the German nation.
In the same way, the other genocides of the century, slavery, Jim Crow,
abortion, etc. all of these destructive pathologies of human society have
reflected the popular will.

Religious belief is a necessary counterbalance to the unchecked impulses
of democratic man. Make the Church, and religion generally, more
democratic and you will remove one of the last remaining checks on the
tyranny of the majority. Turn the great religions of the world into
mere popular institutions and we will no longer have any moral standards
to restrain our basest instincts.

Make no mistake, this is exactly what Carroll has in mind. When
he speaks of changing the Church's perception of the meaning of Christ,
he makes this clear :

...a new Christology, celebrating a Jesus whose saving
act is only disclosure of the divine love
available to all, will enable the Church at last
to embrace a pluralism of belief and worship, of
religion and no-religion, that honors God by defining
God as beyond every human effort to express
God.

This is complete relativism. Christ, God, and belief are all stripped
of any meaning. This pluralism would accept every interpretation,
every belief, every definition. Religion would be completely individualistic--whatever
you believe would be as valid as what the next person believes. This
is not an attempt to redeem the Church and Christianity; it is an attempt
to destroy them by emptying them of their core message.

Consider again the idea of Carroll calling for a similar reform of Judaism.
It would require Jews to abandon the idea that they are the Chosen people,
to discard the Ten Commandments, kosher laws, etc., to abandon the very
idea of one God. What would be left of Judaism ? Would we not
have to consider someone who advocated these things to be anti-Jewish,
if not anti-Semitic ? After all, these proposals would amount to
an end to Judaism more permanent than that achieved by Hitler and the Holocaust.
Is it not fair then to consider Carroll's proposals to constitute an attempt
to destroy the Catholic Church and Christianity generally ? Is it
not fair to consider this book, which casts itself as an attack on anti-Semitism,
to ultimately amount to little more than a prolonged expression of anti-Christianity
?

One of the darkest anti-Semitic practices of the Christian world was
the blood libel, the baseless accusation that Jews used Christian blood
in some bizarre Judaic religious rites (see Bernard Malamud's great novel
The
Fixer). In its own warped way, this book is a kind of blood libel.
It accuses Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular
of nursing a virulent form of Jew hatred at their bosoms, which found ultimate
and inevitable expression in the Holocaust. While it is indeed true
that a persistent and destructive strain of anti-Semitism has accompanied
Christianity right up until the present day, it is grotesque to seek to
blame Christianity for the Holocaust. Further, it is simply anti-historical,
though the charge is here dressed up in the guise of history. There
are plenty of perfectly good reasons for someone to dislike Christianity,
and confronting Christian anti-Semitism is a worthwhile task, but making
the kind of baseless and inflammatory charges that Carroll makes here can
serve little purpose except to stir up hatred. The final disturbing
irony of this book is that it resembles exactly the kind of baseless, hate-filled
slander which has been the historic weapon of the anti-Semite, but directing
the attack against Christianity instead of against Judaism does not make
it any less of a hate crime.

Comments:

Claims of Christians(Christ-FOLLOWERS)murdering Jews are absolutely false. We who follow Christ believe in His Words, and we are absolutely against murder as He is!! Jesus said to those who claimed to follow Him, "If you really did love me, you would keep my commandments." What did The Law (Law of Moses) say about murder? It said: "You shall not murder." Jesus said,"I have not come to banish The Law, but to FULFILL IT." Christ said," I have not come to condemn the world, but TO SAVE IT." Jesus also said: "You shall know a tree by the fruit it bears. No bad tree bears good fruit, and no good tree bears bad fruit." Jesus said this, too:"No servant is greater than his master." This is how you can tell if someone is a Christian or not: compare what they do to Christ's words and actions. This is Jesus' reaction to those who don't readily receive Him, for He is merciful and patient; He hates hands that shed innocent blood.: "And He sent messengers before Him; and they reached and entered a Samaritan village to make [things] ready for Him; "But [the people] would not welcome or receive or accept Him, because His face was [set as if He was] going to Jerusalem. "And when His disciples James and John observed this, they said, 'Lord, do You wish us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them, even as Elijah did?' "But He turned and rebuked and severely censured [to reproach in a vehement manner] them. He said,'You do not know of what sort of spirit you are, "'For the Son of Man did not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them'. And they journeyed on to another village."(Luke 9:52-56) This is how you tell if someone is a Christian or not: compare what they do to Christ's words and actions. Jesus said this:"No servant is greater than his master." Since Jesus did not murder those who did not receive Him, no Christian murders those who don't become Christians, either. "No servant is greater than his master." Clearly, the author of this book has never read this about Christ:"He would not put out the smoldering wick, nor break a bruised reed." Christ is gentle. We Christians (Christ-FOLLOWERS)are gentle. Jesus said to His disciples (followers):"Behold, I send you out as sheep among wolves. Be wise as a serpent, and gentle as doves." Jesus is the Lamb of G-d.